On the occasion of Russia Day on June 12 2024, Moscow’s ambassador to Pakistan Albert Pavlovich Khorev announced that the bilateral trade turnover between Moscow and Islamabad surpassed $1bn in 2023. Khorev, who was appointed by the Russian President as envoy to Islamabad in November 2023, has consistently portrayed the bilateral relationship in optimistic terms; however, no major progress since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine can be observed.

Lacklustre energy interaction

Russia was almost immediately able to secure India and China as alternative markets for its hydrocarbon sales after the West imposed sanctions and sought diversification away from dependence on Moscow as a result of the invasion of Ukraine. Pakistan only started receiving imported Russian crude in June 2023. In doing so, Islamabad secured a substantive discounted rate, more than a year after the Indian and Chinese economies, state-owned companies and private enterprise had been reaping the rewards of similar if not deeper discounts on Russian hydrocarbons.

Pakistan has also yet to implement the 2015 agreement on ‘Pakistan Stream’ project under which Russian state-owned natural gas giant Gazprom is to build a 1,100-km liquefied natural gas (LNG) pipeline between Lahore in Pakistan’s Punjab province, and its largest port of Karachi. The agreement has been renegotiated by Islamabad several times and, according to an October 2023 report by ANI, was a source of “disappointment” to Moscow.

Pakistan vs India in military hardware sales

While Russia may have lifted the decades long arms embargo on Pakistan in 2014, and subsequently sold Mi-35 attack helicopters to Islamabad, this development only came after India snubbed Russian helicopters and instead opted for Boeing’s Chinook and Apache models. As such, the move by Moscow was likely intended as a one-off demonstration to India that Russia could still find a market for the hardware New Delhi snubbed. However, Russia has not concluded another substantive defence deal with Pakistan since.

Furthermore, the relatively small order of 4 Mi-35s was itself dwarfed by the 28 Apache and 15 Chinooks India bought from the US coupled to the five S-400 air defence systems India acquired from Russia in recent years – likely demonstrating to Moscow, in turn, that India is a far larger market that can’t be replaced by Pakistan.

Pakistan weapons sales to Ukraine

According to a report in The Intercept in September 2023 and another in BBC Urdu in November 2023, Pakistan allegedly supplied up to $900m worth of war material, including 155mm artillery shells to Ukraine. The deal was allegedly coordinated with US and British backing.

According to the BBC Urdu report, two US companies – Northrop Grumman and Global Military – signed deals worth a combined total of $363mn for the purchase of the 155mm shells between August 2022 and October 2023. A British Royal Air Force cargo aircraft made five trips between Pakistan’s Nur Khan airbase in Rawalpindi and Cyprus and Romania, and is thought to have moved the ammunition, according to the BBC Urdu report.

Meanwhile, a report in The Intercept says that Pakistan, which was at the time struggling to fulfil conditions to receive a major chunk of a $6bn International Monetary Fund(IMF) bailout, was able to fulfil the financing requirements demanded by the IMF only after the US allegedly intimated the deal’s details to the global body. The US, Pakistan and the IMF denied the claims.

Then-caretaker Prime Minister of Pakistan Anwar ul-Haq Kakar as cited by a 27 September 2023 Washington Post article claimed that the presence of Pakistan Ordnance Factory manufactured ammunition in Ukraine could instead be attributed to the black market, and that Islamabad hadn’t made any official ammunition sales to the US with the intended recipient being Ukraine.

The Afghanistan factor

Pakistan, a major non-Nato ally of the US since 2004, is also an important partner for influence in the Taliban-ruled country for other two great powers – Russia and China. To this end, Islamabad, according to Khorev is an important partner in counter-terrorism efforts for Russia. It was also part of all major forums discussing the 2021 crisis in Afghanistan around the US withdrawal, as well as the fall of the US-backed Ashraf Ghani government and subsequent Taliban takeover.

Nearly 60mn Pashtuns making up the biggest ethnic group of Afghanistan live in Pakistan’s North Western province of Pashtunistan, thus making Pakistan an important stakeholder in any security and counter-terrorism conversation in the Central Asia region. Since the days of the Soviet war in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989 the Pashtuns have been an important partner for the US who assisted the overwhelmingly Pashto ‘Mujahideen’ in their war against the Soviet military. Pakistan was instrumental in facilitating the US support and supplies to the Mujahideen during the 1980s.

A decade later, following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the US invaded Afghanistan and toppled the-then ruling Taliban regime which had emerged from the more Islamist radical elements of the Mujahideen. Once again Pakistan fulfilled its role as an important facilitator for US and its Nato partner forces operating in Afghanistan.

Yet while post-Soviet Russia designated the Taliban as a terrorist organisation in 2003, in a May 2024 statement Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov confirmed that Moscow would remove the Taliban from its list of designated terrorist organisations. This drastic change in Russia’s approach to the Taliban reflects the urgency Moscow attaches to counter-terrorism cooperation.

In a similar vein, during the March 22 2024 Crocus City Hall attack in Moscow, Islamist terrorists of Tajik ethnicity were involved. Tajiks also represent the second biggest ethnic group in Afghanistan after Pashtuns. To this end, the Kremlin’s decision to take the Taliban off the list of terrorist organisations and seek further cooperation could have been influenced by this attack and its regional security ramifications.

Pakistan, which has hosted an influx of Afghan refugees of various ethnicities including Tajiks and Pashtuns after every major crisis in neighbouring Afghanistan, is thus intertwined with Moscow’s security considerations for both Afghanistan and the wider Central Asia region.

While Russia may be breaking new ground with the Taliban, it is unlikely to elevate its security relationship with Pakistan beyond a subset of its affairs in Afghanistan.